firebrand39

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think Mr. Musk is baiting us.

So it is much more a problem of AI getting into the wrong hands than AI itself. Which raises the prospect that it may get used prematurely and with weaknesses. This reduces very much the self perfection scenario completely without human intervention. In turn, the human/AI evil scenario warrants a look at the history of "empire builders". ... long story .... But I do believe that history is not Musk's forte.

And btw, what about crowd sourcing and scaling? Just bog standard human collaboration. I would not underestimate this (history again). These things can be just as powerful as AI.

SSH is calling a shell. If it is bash and the vulnerability test is positive http://fedoramagazine.org/shellshock-how-does-it-actually-wo... then your VPS is vulnerable and you better patch it.

To other posters. This vulnerability is so trivial (it creates a function in an environment variable), not some kind of sophisticated buffer overflow etc., that I wonder if this was once a bash feature.

Any comments?

Bezos is finally overreaching.

This is fabulous. It makes me speechless as to why this true and not surprising at all.

My quick theory is that deep down we are social animals and a lot of our 'management' decisions stem from this part of us. Not from wanting to rationally and technically solve problems. For example, many 'higher' animals have pecking orders. We have too. On the other hand, we are capable of rationality after all. But we will have to be much more honest with ourselves of what we are. Maybe a lot of human development in history is about escaping our limits. Which is not to say that we should negate or supress them.

There is tons of studies on mismanagement in organisations (state down to enterprises) but this article nails it.

Why not eastern Europe. Budapest comes to mind. They do have a well educated tech work force. The politics may be inconvenient but its the EU after all.

Cost is low and it is a real adventure :-)

If anybody has a convincing idea, I'll come along (fluent german and english). Hungarian will work after a while.

True, and they have been surging again after the chinese government eased monetary conditions after the financial crisis in 2009 (remember).

But to Xi Jinpings credit -and I do not think he is getting enough of it- he has pricked it.

For those not actively following china. There is a big difference between the central government (Xi Jinping) and provincial and local government. In that the central government has much less control than one would think or is used to in the West.

Chinese leadership is implementing a lot of new policies which can be summarized under 'improved quality of economic growth'. So we will see how that goes. But it should have an impact on emigration.

Very true. I think it is precisely the not-fitting in which makes cultural mixture very very productive. Or in other words, cultural homogeneity is stagnation and unproductive.

Besides, did anybody realize how much chinese are contributing to high tech, battery tech from a chinese guy at stanford. Math from many chinese.

That said, of course the chinese government will want to take advantage of this like the russians will with their emmigres. The scale though may be frightening.

Well, in the first place I cannot. I take the thing as it is. This is the risk-taking part. But, I guess, that is why I have to move from correlation to causation or rather embed this one correlation into a broader context. Because it protects me against correlational flukes.

Thanks for this inspiring question.

I have been privately lumping causation and correlation together for decades now. It freed my thinking. While the two are certainly different, it is also true that causation does not have the set-in-stoneness/invariability that is commonly taken for granted. Witness the recent discussion about nasa's impossible-space-propulsion.

In terms of a human acquiring knowledge, correlation certainly is the first step. It is also called observation. Causation just seems to be a subsequent underpinning with context and concepts.

Just a very delightful quote from the link above:

<quote>To me, however, a programmer is who I'm looking for, while a resume full of revenue increases and cost reductions sounds like an "anomalously high-cost parasite who types some mumbo-jumbo into Excel and PowerPoint, claiming credit for others' work".</quote>

Mind you, I am not saying that value-adding is a bad-thing. But given all the opportunities these days, Flash storage for example makes a world of difference, it is amazing how stubbornly all those PowerPoint mumbo-jumbu types resist. Usage of these technologies (in jargon, embracing technology) can add big bucks.

Oh boy, they love powerpoints and meetings as much as they lack technical skills, in my experience.

Well, what if being a "Programmer/Analyst II" is precisely what you want? In my case it is absolutely true, both of it.

For once, I would love to see those despisers of hands-on-technology honestly describe what they want for themselves. Just admit it, you 'people-persons' (or hedonists maybe) just want a lazy convenient live with consumption to the hilt.

From 2011, this article is just the usual business trash talk.

Contrary to the article, one does not succeed in business by adding value whichever way. Clearly, it is optimal adaptation to the organisational environment which counts, i.e. kissing ass, brown nosing.

This is no caricature but the sad truth. Humans are social beings and it shows everywhere.

Organisations are very focused on keeping the status quo. Value adding just serves this purpose. Added value beyond this is just collateral damage, lack of oversight etc..

Conclusion, do what you love and if it is programming. Go for it. Everything else is just cash flow paying the bills.

Honestly, any manager who does not have a hands-on approach is a waste (20 years business/it experience). That said, there is what I call management-craftsmanship, i.e. knowing how the legal environment influences you, understanding accounting etc., stuff you learn in (any) mba. This craftsmanship may be confused with being a good manager. It is not. It is just basics which wear off quickly. These types just do not add value mid- and long-term. They are usually just highly political bureaucrats.

Just be smart and study other companies. Google comes to mind. And be critical (value-adding, benevolent) with yourself.

Again (same article, same question) from a 2 weeks ago.

Well, and then it is go from google, also known as golang.

Well, you are right it reminded me of method overloading. Otherwise I think time will tell. In the end generics are just types with parameters, for creating typed permutations _at_compile_time_ of functions/maps etc.. And as you said, java worked quite a while without them.

That's probably more a matter of taste. Go has a reflect package which allows the programmer to determine type at runtime, making generics unnecessary. It may not be as convenient and familiar as generics. Here is an example http://play.golang.org/p/a18VESulWS

go (golang, google language) is pretty cool too. They are pulling a lot of good things together from other languages (c++, java) but leave out the useless/once fashionable/error prone stuff. It even has pointers (which I like because they are fast).

Best of all it has super duper easy concurrency baked in (compared to java threads), which really allows a lot more programmers to really use all those cores, even on their notebooks (I love seeing top at 400% on my notebook (4 cores):-)

Also it has garbage collection and is compiled to native machine instructions so it is really fast. And you'd be surprised how much the 1.3 release has matured already even with still lacking libs.

Apart from an as-yet sparse eco-system, what is not to like.

Kudos to this very, very good article. Let me add a couple of facets.

- Walter Euckens 'ordoliberalism' which laid the foundation for the postwar German 'economic miracle' was a direct response to the chaos and ineptitude of Hitler's bureaucracy. I believe Eucken worked within Hitlers economic planning bureaucracy.

- Albert Speer, Hitler's 'Minister of Armaments', removed the tangle of agencies and ministries by centralizing power over economic planning and by giving factories 'self responsiblity' allowing the german war economy to reach peak output in 1944. (see wikipedia)

- The production of the V2 'wunderwaffe' actually cost more lives of forced labor (see Speer) than its deployment.

- After the end of the war, german productivity leapfroged with the introduction of american machinery, like producing a Beatle car got faster by the order of ten times (I believe, if readers have precises figures, please share them).

What is the moral of all this? Ethics and hard-nosed productivity are really not separate at all.

How about math? Being a programmer helped my get up to speed on math. And there are so many wonderful resources out there. My advice, do not buy a textbook and try to kind of linearly take in math from a single author. Pick a topic and then move around with Google following your interest and questions. Fill in the gaps with Google searches as you move along. This has been tremendously useful to me, and, yes, I am very grateful to Google. When I started, my interest had been piqued by machine learning. I did not expect to get as far as I did, hitting a wall sooner or later, but not so. There are really really great authors and blogs out there, explaining in plain language what you may not understand. You just have to find them and they are by no means all Ivy League. Although my current favorite is Steven G. Johnson from MIT.

A very good thing is the minus sign in google search. It allows you to exclude keywords and sites. They should expand that. My searchbar gets very crowded at times.

Coldtea has a point. 'Too big to fail' banks, coercive patent litigation and so on, indicates to me that 'free markets' are nothing but an ideological cover up for coercive powers in the hand of private actors instead of the state. That's no real freedom either. This is no middle class lefty thought but an observation.

Glad that the fogbeam guy asked. Me always thought that Google was 'better' than, say, Microsoft and if google were to become just another 'evil' organisation, that would be troubling. So here is my take. The key word for me is organisation, not profit. Anybody who has been working for a big organisation for a while knows how dysfunctional and political they can be. Completely distracted from whatever 'official' goal they have, profit or not. There seems to be a natural live cycle to any organisation. Grandiosely, call it the Rome Syndrome. Start from honest and humble yet promising beginnings, growth and consolidation, peak power, decay and death. Some companies survive but get hollowed out and survive only in name (e.g. IBM).

In light of this, in order to not become 'evil', google has to work on its organisation. And they do, Rubin's and Huber's exit, spring cleaning etc.. Also, all the smart technology google has could allow them to avoid bloated bureaucracies, hence not becoming evil.

But they are no Uber-humans. So let's see.

Firebrand